Extreme Denial (24 page)

Decker heard footsteps enter the courtyard. He looked up, to find Hal standing next to him.

“Did she ever mention that she’d like to go to any particular place?” Hal asked.

“No. Only that she wanted to close the door on her life back east. I thought you were leaving.”

“No rush.”

“Isn’t there?” Frustrated, Decker imagined Brian McKittrick driving Beth along Fort Connor Lane as she felt the nimble of the explosions that blew her house apart on the street above her. If only the old woman who had seen the car drive away had gotten the license number. Numbers, he was thinking. Maybe the record of the telephone calls Beth made from her hospital room would provide a direction in which to search.

Or calls she made from her
home
phone, Decker thought. I’ll have to remind Esperanza to check on that. But Decker’s skepticism about Esperanza continued to make him uneasy. What if Esperanza holds back information?

“There has to be another way,” Decker said again. “What alternatives are there to trace her? It can’t be through her paintings. She never told me the name of the New York gallery she used. There are hundreds and hundreds of galleries there. Given the time pressure, it would take too long to contact every one of them. Anyway, for all I know, the gallery was a lie and Beth never sold
any
paintings. The only proof was the art dealer I met, Dale Hawkins, and he might not have been who Beth said he was. If only I’d thought to make a note of the license number on the car he parked outside her house. But I didn’t have a reason to be suspicious.”

When Decker looked up, Hal and Ben were watching him strangely. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re gesturing and muttering to yourself.”

“The car,” Decker said.

“Excuse me?”

“The car Hawkins was driving. That’s it!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dale Hawkins was driving a rental.” Decker stood, excited. “When I passed the front window, I looked in and saw the envelope for the rental agreement on the front seat. I’m pretty sure it was Avis. And I’m
very
sure the date was September first, because that was when Beth closed the deal on her house. A blue Chevrolet Cavalier. If Dale Hawkins flew into Albuquerque as he claimed, he would have rented the car at the airport. He would have needed to show his driver’s license and a credit card. I can find out his home address.” Decker’s excitement suddenly was smothered. “Assuming Esperanza tells me what he learns from the car-rental company.”

Decker looked long and hard at Hal and Ben.

“I’m probably going to regret this,” Hal said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I guess I can wait a while to let headquarters know that what happened last night has nothing to do with business.”

“You’re going to help me?”

“Do you remember when the three of us worked together in Beirut?” Hal asked unexpectedly.

“How could I forget?”

On March 16, 1984, the Shiite terrorist group, Hizballah, had kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley. Decker, Hal, and Ben had been part of a task force trying to find where Buckley was being held prisoner. Decker’s part in the search had lasted until September, when he had been transferred to antiterrorist activities in Germany. The intensity of those hot summer months and the determination of the task force were seared in his memory. Buckley was never located. A year later, on October 11,1985, Hizballah announced Buckley’s death.

“Down the street from the task force headquarters, there was a little zoo,” Hal said. “Do you remember
that?”

“Certainly. I don’t know how many animals the zoo had before the civil war broke out, but when we arrived, the only ones left were a leopard, a giraffe, and a bear. The bear hadn’t adjusted to the climate. It was pathetic.”

“Then a sniper from one of the factions decided to make a game of shooting at whoever went out to feed the animals. The sniper killed the caretaker. In the next two days, he popped off four volunteers. The animals began to starve.”

“I remember that, too.” Decker felt a constriction in his throat.

“One night, you disappeared. When you came back in the morning, you said you were going to take food and water out to the animals. I tried to stop you. I warned you the sniper would like nothing better than to kill an American. You told me you had taken care of the sniper. He wasn’t going to be a problem any longer. Of course, another sniper might have replaced him and shot at you, but that didn’t seem to bother you. You were determined to make sure the animals weren’t suffering.”

The courtyard became silent.

“Why did you mention that?” Decker asked.

“Because
I
thought about going out to track down that sniper,” Hal said. “But I never worked up the nerve. I envied you for having done what
I
should have. Funny, huh? Beirut was a pit of human misery, but we were worried about those three animals. Of course, it didn’t make any difference. A mortar shell killed them the next day.”

“But they didn’t die hungry,” Decker said.

“That’s right. You’re a stand-up guy. Show me where the nearest pay phone is,” Hal said. “I’ll tell headquarters we’re still looking into things. I’ll ask them to use their computer network to find out who rented a blue Chevrolet Cavalier from Avis at the Albuquerque airport on September first. There was probably more than one Cavalier. A good thing it’s not a big airport.”

“Hal?”

“What?”

“...Thanks.”

7

Decker struggled with painful emotions as he stared out the rear window of the Ford Taurus that Hal and Ben had rented when they drove up from Albuquerque earlier in the day. That seemed an eternity ago. What he saw through the car’s rear window was the diminishing vista of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, of yellowing aspen in the ski basin, of adobe houses nestled into foothills, of piñons and junipers and the crimson glow of a high-desert sunset. For the first time since he had arrived more than a year ago, he was leaving Santa Fe. Oh, he had driven out of the city limits before—to go fishing or white-water rafting or on sight-seeing expeditions to Taos. But those day trips had somehow seemed an extension of Santa Fe, and after all, they had been brief, and he had known that he would soon be coming back.

Now, however, he was truly leaving—for how long he had no idea or whether he would, in fact, be coming back. Certainly, he wanted to come back, with all his heart, the sooner the better, but the issue was, would he be
able
to come back? Would the search upon which he had embarked create pitfalls that would
prevent
him from coming back? Would he
survive
to come back? During his numerous missions in military special operations and later as an intelligence operative, he had remained alive, in part because he had a professional’s ability to distinguish between acceptable risks and foolhardy ones. But being a professional required more than just making judgments based on training, experience, and ability. It demanded a particular attitude—a balance between commitment and objectivity. Decker had resigned from intelligence work because he no longer had the commitment and was sick of an objectivity that left him feeling detached from everything around him.

But he definitely felt committed now, more than at any time in his life. He was totally, passionately, obsessively determined to find Beth. His love for her was infinite. She was the focus of his life. He would risk anything to catch up to her.

Anything? he asked himself, and his answer was immediate. Yes. Because if he wasn’t able to find Beth, if he wasn’t able to resolve the overwhelming tensions that seized him, he wouldn’t be able to continue with anything else. His life would have no meaning. He would be lost.

As he peered morosely out the Taurus’s side window, noting how the sunset’s crimson had intensified, almost bloodred, he heard Hal in the front seat saying something, repeating his name.

“What is it?”

“Do people around here always drive this crazy, or is it just because of the holiday weekend?”

“No. Traffic’s always this crazy,” Decker said, only partly attending to the conversation.

“I thought New York and Los Angeles had terrible drivers. But I’ve never seen anything like this. They come up right behind my rear bumper at sixty-five miles an hour. I can see them in my rearview mirror, glaring at me because I’m not going eighty. They veer out into the passing lane without using their signal, then veer back into
my
lane, again without signaling, this time almost scraping my
front
bumper. Then they race ahead to crowd the next car. Sure, in New York and Los Angeles, they crowd you, too, but that’s because everybody’s in gridlock. Here, there’s plenty of space ahead and behind me, but they
still
crowd you. What the hell’s going on?”    .

Decker didn’t answer. He was peering through the back window again, noting that the foothills and adobe houses had gotten even smaller. He was beginning to feel as if he were plummeting away from them. The racetrack flashed by. Then the Taurus began the climb to the peak of La Bajada hill and the start of the two-thousand-foot southward drop toward Albuquerque.

“Saturday night,” Hal said. “The guy might not be home.”

“Then I’ll wait until he comes back,” Decker said.

“We’ll all wait,” Ben said.

Emotion made it difficult for Decker to speak. “Thanks. I appreciate this.”

“But I don’t know how long I can keep stalling headquarters,” Hal said.

“You’ve already been a great help.”

“Maybe. We’ll soon find out if what I learned really does help.”

When Hal had driven to a pay phone in Santa Fe, he had requested information from his employer’s computer system. The system had covert links to every civilian data bank in the United States and with remarkable speed was able to inform Hal that while several blue Chevrolet Cavaliers served as rental cars at the Albuquerque airport, all but one had been rented prior to Thursday, September 1. The remaining Cavalier had indeed been rented on September 1, at 10:13 in the morning, but the name of the renter had not been Dale Hawkins, as Decker had hoped. Instead, the name had been Randolph Green, and his address had not been in or around New York City, as would have been the case for Dale Hawkins; rather, the address had been in Albuquerque itself.

“Randolph Green,” Hal said, driving farther from Santa Fe, almost to the crest of the hill. “Who do you suppose he is?”

“And why does a man who lives in Albuquerque go out to the airport to rent a car?” Decker turned from the diminishing crimson sunset. “That’s what makes me think we’re on the right track.”

“Or at least the only track that’s promising,” Ben said.

“But why would Beth lie about his name?” Decker shook his head. In a way, the question was naive—he already knew part of the answer. Beth had lied for the same reason she hadn’t told him she thought
she
was the real target of last night’s attack, for the same reason she hadn’t told him that Brian McKittrick would be waiting on Fort Connor Lane to pick her up. Throughout her relationship with me, Decker thought, she’s been hiding something. The relationship itself had been a lie.

No! he insisted. It
can’t
have been a lie. How could anything that powerful have been a sham? Wouldn’t I have seen the deception in her eyes? Wouldn’t I have noticed hesitancy or calculation,
something
in her manner that would have given her away? I used to be a master of calculation. She couldn’t possibly have fooled me. The emotion she showed toward me was real, the tenderness, the passion, the caring, the ... Decker was about to use the word
love
when it occurred to him that he couldn’t recall an occasion when Beth had told him directly that she loved him. He had said it to her often enough. But had she ever initiated the statement or echoed it when he said it to her? Trying as hard as he could, he was unable to remember.

Other memories came readily—the first time he and Beth had made love, sinking to the brick floor of her studio, uncertain, tentative, awestruck, wanting, caressing, exploring. That, also, had been on September 1, after he had met “Dale Hawkins,” after Beth had shown Decker her paintings. An avalanche of doubting questions threatened to crush Decker’s sanity. Had Beth actually painted them? Was Beth Dwyer her true name? Was her husband in fact dead? For that matter, had she ever been married? What was her relationship with Brian McKittrick? It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that McKittrick knew
both
Decker and Beth.

Madness, Decker thought. Sweat beaded on his upper lip. He felt off balance. Nothing was as it seemed. Everything he had taken for granted was called into question. He had a persistent sense of falling and almost wished that he had never resigned from intelligence work. At least, back then, he had known the rules. Deception was the norm, and he had never been fooled by the lies presented to him. Now, in his determination to believe that life didn’t have to be based on deception, he had finally been deceived.

Then why, he asked himself, did he feel so determined to catch up to Beth? To protect the woman he loved? Or was his motive the need to demand explanations from the woman who had lied to him? Confusion was the only thing about which he was certain—and the fact that for whatever reason, he would never rest until he found Beth. He would die trying.

Ben was talking to him again. “When that detective— what’s his name? Esperanza?—figures out you’ve left town, he’ll be mad as hell. He’ll have the state police looking for you.”

“For all of us,” Hal added. “He saw this rental car parked in front of Steve’s house. He can describe it.”

“Yes,” Decker said. “He’ll come looking for me.”

The Taurus crested the hill and began the long descent toward Albuquerque. As Santa Fe vanished, Decker turned to study the dark uncertainties that faced him.

SEVEN

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